Can't install in Python 3.9.0 on Win 8.1 Pro

[RussellJQA]

I tried to install Playwright in CPython 3.9.0 on Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional.

I did this by typing:
• pip install playwright
in a new Python virtual environment (in a terminal within VS Code 1.50.1).

Doing so gave me a fatal error:
c:\python39\include\pyconfig.h(201): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'basetsd.h': No such file or directory
error: command 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\VC\BIN\x86_amd64\cl.exe' failed with exit code 2

The installation is apparently looking for some Visual Studio 14.0 (VS 2015) files.

On Playwright's PyPi.org page (https://pypi.org/project/playwright/):
• The Meta section says:
Requires: Python >= 3.7
• The 'Programming Language' section says:
Python::3
Python::3.7
Python::3.8

So it seems that maybe PyPi hasn't yet been updated with the binaries needed to install Playwright in Python 3.9.

I've attached the full output from 'pip install playwright'.txt

[mxschmitt]

Hi, can you try to install wheel before you install Playwright for Python?

pip install wheel
pip install playwright

Background: Internally currently there is wheel required to use Playwright for Python.

[RussellJQA]

Thanks for your help. I just tried:

pip install wheel
pip install playwright

but I still got:

c:\python39\include\pyconfig.h(201): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'basetsd.h': No such file or directory
  error: command 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\\VC\\BIN\\x86_amd64\\cl.exe' failed with exit code 2

Again, I've attached the full Output from pip install playwright (after first pip-installing wheel).txt

[mxschmitt]

Hi, it has something to do with your Python installation. Maybe these help you:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23691564/running-cython-in-windows-x64-fatal-error-c1083-cannot-open-include-file-ba
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44437357/fatal-error-c1083-cannot-open-include-file-basetsd-h

[RussellJQA]

Thanks, @mxschmitt.

I hadn't realized, but the problem is not with playwright itself, but with greenlet (1 of playwright's dependencies). Playwright doesn't directly use any native Windows code, but greenlet does. So it's actually greenlet that needs the Visual Studio build files.

I checked the available download files for greenlet on PyPi (https://pypi.org/project/greenlet/#files). There I can see that they have a Linux wheel for Python 3.9, but their latest Windows wheels are for Python 3.8.

So, I opened a greenelet issue "PyPi needs Windows wheels for Python 3.9" (python-greenlet/greenlet#200).

And I would think this issue can be closed.

[pavelfeldman]

Looks like 1.0a has binaries published via python-greenlet/greenlet#200 (comment). So we can try rolling to it.

[RussellJQA]

Great! Thanks!

[mxschmitt]

@RussellJQA since we don't pin the greenlet version you should be able to try it out with:

pip install playwright
pip install greenlet==1.0a1

Would be great if you could test it and confirm if its working or not. (they released it as a pre-version)

[RussellJQA]

Thanks! That fixed it. I just tried:

    pip install playwright  # That gave me the same error as before, but I think that was to be expected
    pip install greenlet==1.0a1 # That worked fine
    pip install playwright # That worked fine

Here's the output from the 2nd 'pip install playwright':

Collecting playwright
  Using cached playwright-0.162.1-py3-none-win_amd64.whl (54.5 MB)
Requirement already satisfied: typing-extensions in c:\users\rljohnson\documents\gith
site-packages (from playwright) (3.7.4.3)
Requirement already satisfied: pyee>=8.0.1 in c:\users\rljohnson\documents\github\pyt
ackages (from playwright) (8.1.0)
Requirement already satisfied: greenlet>=0.4.17 in c:\users\rljohnson\documents\githu
ite-packages (from playwright) (1.0a1)
Installing collected packages: playwright
Successfully installed playwright-0.162.1

So I can confirm that it's working! Thanks!